To J. R. Lowell

September 23, 1855.

I had just begun my letter to you, my dear Lowell, when I was interrupted by Jane's calling upon me to go out with her, and as I left it unwillingly I said to Grace, "I wish you would sit down at my table and finish a letter which you will find lying upon it." This, as you see, she not unwillingly did, and had she not forgotten two or three things of which I meant to write to you, I would have signed my name and sent the letter last week.

Since she wrote our plans have greatly changed. Instead of my going abroad alone, we are all going together. This is delightful. It has long been one of my pleasant hopes that my Mother might at some time see Italy, and I am sure that nothing (so far as we can see) could be better for her than to have the change and added interests of life which some months in Europe will bring to her. We mean to sail on the 10th October, and our next fixed point is to be in Rome by the middle of December. There we shall spend the winter, and, as one of the greatest pleasures which the winter has in promise, I look forward to your coming and staying with us for as long as it is possible. It gives at once a new home feeling to the anticipation of being in Rome to think of seeing you there. When this reaches you, pray write to me, to the care of Baring Brothers, and tell me what your plans are, and how you are.

And now for other things. very quickly and very quietly,

The summer has gone

the principal event

for us being the birth of a second son to my sister Louisa. Newport has displayed its usual charms, and never was fuller of the world,—but we have seen very little of the gay society. I have passed the summer in lounging and reading and writing. . . . In the course of July Stillman came from New York to make me a visit. He stayed two or three days and then was suddenly called away by the illness of a brother. I have heard often from him since, and have learned to know him very well. He interests me greatly. I have never known anyone more earnest and faithful in his desire and search for spiritual improvement. His character is one of very marked individuality. It is too intense, too self-introverted to be happy, and the circumstances of his life have been so sad as to make it one long suffering. He is not well, and the combination of illhealth with too much care and too hard work has made him low-spirited, and has put him out of heart so far as a man who has a sure, reliant trust in the goodness and constant love of God can be put out of heart. I long to do something to help him. I shall bring you some of his letters to see. They will interest you still more in him. He needs inspiriting, and I know nothing which would do him more good than to receive a letter from you. I hope you have already written to him; if not pray write to him soon. Meanwhile the "Crayon "1 goes on well; every number has much that is excellent, but it is not yet paying for itself and it will come to the end of its first year with a large balance of loss against

1 The first art magazine published in America, under the editorship of W. J. Stillman.

it. This I am very sorry for, for it is the one periodical in our country whose failure would be cause for real regret. You will like to hear that I am to have the picture of Stillman's which pleased you, and which pleases me now as much as it did you when you first saw it in New York, and told me of it in the library at Shady Hill.

The summer is not the time for new pictures or new books, and there have been few of either in which you would have been much interested. Longfellow's new poem, the "Song of Hiawatha," will very soon appear. He gave me half of it to read a month or two ago. It is very different from anything that he has done before, and being wholly founded on our Indian legends is too remote from the interests of present life, and too distinct in the tone of sentiment from that of our day, to give him full scope for the display of his finest and most peculiar poetic characteristics. It has a little the air of having been crammed for, and written not from the fulness of the heart but the fulness of the head. Still there is much in it that is very charming, —it is fresh, simple, free from conceits and prettinesses, and the octosyllabic blank verse in which it is written is exquisitely modulated, and managed with all the melodious skill with which Longfellow always controls the metres that he uses.

Hiawatha is the hero of the story, which is in part purely mythical in its character, in part simply descriptive of Indian life in the forest. He is one of the heroes, half human, half divine, of the ancient times, and the story of his deeds is told by the poet to the later

generations. He is the fighter with the winds, the conqueror of the maize, the redresser of wrongs and the deliverer of his people. But perhaps my criticism on this poem is wrong. It is at any rate imperfect, as I have seen, as I said, only the first half, and Longfellow tells me that the part I have not seen is better than that which I have....

A new book called "Leaves of Grass" has just come out which is worth knowing about. It is a quarto volume of unmetrical poetry, and its author according to his own account, is "Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos." It is a book which has excited Emerson's enthusiasm. He has written a letter to this "one of the roughs" which I have seen, expressing the warmest admiration and encouragement. It is no wonder that he likes it, for Walt Whitman has read the "Dial" and "Nature," and combines the characteristics of a Concord philosopher with those of a New York fireman. There is little original thought but much original expression in it. There are some passages of most vigorous and vivid writing, some superbly graphic description, great stretches of imagination, - and then passages of intolerable coarseness, not gross and licentious, but simply disgustingly coarse. The book is such, indeed, that one cannot leave it about for chance readers, and would be sorry to know that any woman had looked into it past the title-page. I have got a copy for you, for there are things in it that you will admire, and it is worth having merely as a literary curiosity, for the external appearance of it, the covers, the portrait, the print, are as odd as the inside. . . .

CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND ITALY

(1855-1857)

THOUGH the division of Norton's days between Cambridge and Newport, the Boston counting-house and his study, afforded a variety of congenial employments in the years that followed his return from India, the energy and industry with which he applied himself to all his undertakings told upon his strength, always somewhat limited, and two years after the death of his father it was manifest that a term of travel and holiday ordered by the doctors would be desirable. In October, 1855, with his mother and two sisters, he therefore sailed from Boston for Liverpool.

In a brief notebook record of this time he wrote, "Tom Appleton joined us in the autumn in England, and a more agreeable companion than he was one could not find. After a few months in England, we crossed to the Continent, and from Paris, after hiring a travelling carriage, we drove through France to Marseilles: then on by the Corniche road and Riviera from Marseilles to Genoa, and from Genoa to Leghorn. A more delightful form of travel there is none than that we adopted, the well-built carriage, with the four good horses and the driver, making the pleasantest sort of conveyance. The railroad along the Mediterranean had not yet spoiled the way. Although the American